Senior Congress leader, trade unionist and former Rajya Sabha member Rama Chandra Khuntia urged for use of Odia in the national medical entrance test.
In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union HRD Minister Smriti Zubin Irani, Union Minister of health and Family Welfare Jagat Prakash Nadda and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Khuntia said that while regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Guajarati, Bengali, Assami, Marathi and Hindi, apart from English, are used for the test, Odia, which is one of the oldest languages and spoken by about 5 crore people, is excluded.
Stating that Odia is the first language on the basis of which a State was created by the Britishers in the year 1936 and that the language was accorded classical status in 2014, Khuntia said that Odia apart from the people of Odisha is also spoken by lakhs of people in the States like Jharakhand, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Andhra, Gujarat and Delhi especially in the places like Madinapur, West and East Singhbhum, Tata Nagar, Raigada, Mahasamunda, Bastar, Manjusha, Parbatipuram,Vishakhapatnam, Tekali, Surat and Delhi etc.
This is precisely the reason for which Odisha Government has allowed reservations for admission into some of its educational institutions for the Odia speaking population, he said. Besides he added that because of language advantage, patients from these States and places come to the Government Medical Colleges and Hospitals (MCH) at Cuttack, Sambalpur and Brahmapur for their treatment.